


just a girl, no wonder

by elliebell (Naladot)



Category: Wonder Girls
Genre: Angst, Canon Universe, Dark, Eating Disorders, F/M, Fame, Friends With Benefits, Friendship, Gen, Non-Explicit Sex, Self-Discovery, Self-Esteem Issues, idolverse, minor Lim/Nichkhun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:20:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22660312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/elliebell
Summary: She and Jia used to have this game, back when they were trainees, staying at decrepit two-star hotels in China while chasing stardom down dead-end paths. The game went like this: "when I’m famous I will…"It ranged from simple—"when I’m famous I’ll always demand a basket of fresh egg tarts in my dressing room"—to serious—"when I’m famous I’ll make sure that creeps like that get fired."One time, staring up at a cracked ceiling in the semi-dark glow of the city night seeping though the curtains, Hyerim said "when I’m famous everyone will like me and nothing anyone says about me will hurt me."How an idol falls apart, and puts herself back together again.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 24
Collections: BBBFest Debut Round: The Bittersweet Option





	just a girl, no wonder

**Author's Note:**

> There are probably a lot of things I should say about this fic, but the first and foremost is that I do not consider this in any way to be "reality." It is a work of fiction. Because of this I have also taken some liberties with small divergences from the "canon" timeline.
> 
> Strong warning for depictions of eating disorders throughout the fic. Warning for a brief reference to ableist insults made by fans when Lim joined the group.

* * *

_ I'm no 아이 and I'm not a doll _

_ — Wonder Girls, “Back” _

  
  


There is a girl in the empty back hallway of the television studio. Or a woman, depending on your point of view. The paper taped to her t-shirt says 원더걸스 so maybe “girl” is the best label. She squats next to the wall, balanced on five inch heels, and puts her forehead in her hands. She is alone. She does not cry, because at five AM this morning she sat for an hour in a salon chair while a team of professionals curled her hair and pasted fake eyelashes on top of her eyelashes and lined her swollen mouth so that the injection marks won’t show on camera, and crying would waste the hard work of dozens of people who all deserve to get paid, and she is nothing if not responsible. She is also hard-working, sweet, dependable, nice. She doesn’t have enough talent to mitigate a bad attitude, so she does not have a bad attitude.

She stands up and squares her shoulders. Bone-thin, they form two perfect right angles. Bass from someone else’s song reverberates through the hallway. She sucks in a deep breath. She walks back the way she came.

  
  
  


The Wonder Girls’ waiting room is in a frenzy.

Hyerim slips in just as two of their managers stalk out, complaining in hisses about the television studio’s production secretary, who had apparently given them a misprinted schedule. Inside the room, Sunmi is perched on one of the styling chairs while a stylist re-curls the ends of her hair. Yeeun and Yubin sit on the far end of the room with three staff people recording them as they ramble about whatever topic might net some views on YouTube. Sunye, avoiding the cameras, is holding her daughter with one arm while she gives empathetic nods to one of their oldest managers, one who predates Hyerim. She doesn’t seem to notice that her daughter is chewing happily on the large charm of her necklace. Sohee sits in the remaining styling chair, slouched down, typing diligently on her phone. They’re all here, a six-member reunion, though the public will never know.

Hyerim scans the room for her bag where she’s left her anxiety medicine. Before she can reach it, one of the staff calls her name, and waves her over for a picture. Hyerim switches routes, stepping in line beside Sunmi as she fluffs her hair. A manager rushes over with a fan-purchased cake and sets it in Yeeun’s arms. 

They all smile in unison, right on cue.

  
  
  


Sunmi cuts the cake. Someone puts on some old Wonder Girls songs, for the nostalgia, Hyerim supposes. “Why are we listening to this?” Sohee says, wrinkling her nose as she takes a piece of cake from Sunmi’s waiting hand. “Aren’t they has-beens?” She says the last part in English, and giggles.

“That Yubin looks hot though,” Yubin jokes, pushing away Sunmi’s hand when she offers her cake. “Girl crush, am I right?”

“Says you,” Sohee laughs. “I miss Ahn Sohee. Omona!” She does the last part with an outrageous, sarcastic flourish. Everyone laughs. 

Hyerim takes the piece of cake that Sunmi offers her. She cuts a small, measured bite with her fork.

“Hey now,” Yeeun says, stealing a bite of Sohee’s cake and ignoring her glare. “It’s Sunmi who’s the real star!”

Sunmi rolls her eyes. “You just want more cake, don’t you?” she scoffs. She cuts a comically large piece and takes a bite that leaves crumbs and frosting all over her mouth. Across the room, their manager is looking at her, calculating how many minutes it will take to re-do her makeup before they go on stage.

Hyerim puts the forkful of cake in her mouth. She holds the cake in her mouth without chewing. It disintegrates on her tongue.

Sunye’s daughter is dancing—bobbing, really—to “Tell Me.” Their manager goes to take a video.

“Come on, you guys,” Sunye says, and sweeps her daughter up into her arms. “It’s Woo Hyerim who has had the biggest ‘glow up.’”

Everyone looks at Hyerim. She forces herself to swallow the cake. It slides thickly down her throat.

“Not really,” she manages to say. She smiles wide. “Yeeun thought I should dye my hair pink.”

“And you didn’t take my advice!” Yeeun laughs, tossing her own pink hair..

“Ungrateful kids,” Yubin scoffs.

Hyerim waits until no one is looking, and throws the rest of her cake away in the trash.

  
  
  


Stage lights cast a glare in Hyerim’s eyes as she steps up to her mark. The lights burn hot and so the set is kept cold, raising goosebumps on her skin. Sunmi and Yubin laugh about something in front of her, hugging their thin arms around their own bare, goosebump-covered skin.

Yeeun puts a microphone up to her mouth. “Hello, we are the Wonder Girls!” she announces, and they all bow on cue. Hyerim smiles and waves into the darkness beyond the lights.

Hyerim puts the strap of her guitar over her shoulder. The room tilts slightly under her feet, then rights itself. Beyond the lights rise a small assortment of fans, people she’s met over the years and wondered about, especially why they come and spend their time here when they could be anywhere else. She’s said _ we’re so grateful for our fans _ a thousand times but lately she wonders what they’re expecting when they arrive here in the dark hours of the morning, and what sort of person she’s supposed to be to satisfy that.

The floor manager signals them to get ready. Hyerim turns to the only thing that matters: the red light over the camera that means _ recording. _

She sucks in a breath that burns her lungs. The music starts.

  
  
  


She and Jia used to have this game, back when they were trainees, staying at decrepit two-star hotels in China while chasing stardom down dead-end paths. The game went like this: _ when I’m famous I will… _

It ranged from simple—_ when I’m famous I’ll always demand a basket of fresh egg tarts in my dressing room _ —to serious— _ when I’m famous I’ll make sure that creeps like that get fired. _

One time, staring up at a cracked ceiling in the semi-dark glow of the city night seeping though the curtains, Hyerim said _ when I’m famous everyone will like me and nothing anyone says about me will hurt me_.

In the end, though, it was just a game.

  
  
  
  
  


_ 나는 Good girl, I mean a really good girl _

_ —Wonder Girls, “Candle” _

  
  


Hyerim watches a lightbulb flicker under its lampshade, a caged glow, like a firefly trying to escape from the jar. Her heartbeat flutters in time with the light, rapidly advancing to the moment when it burns out. Every day, it seems like, she’s just getting closer.

She swings her legs to the side of the bed, and turns the light off. The noise of a shower hums in the background. If only she could tell her younger self about how she’d gotten into the place where she once only imagined ending up in her most secret, embarrassing dreams: in Nichkhun’s bed. Her younger self would have appreciated this more, and enjoyed it better. Currently, she is chilled to the bone, shivering and wishing she had stayed home.

The lampshade covering the now-dark bulb is expensive, chosen by a decorator Nichkhun hired through a friend of a friend of an acquaintance. It’s never been dusted. This whole house smells like it’s been shut up tight and forgotten, a stale and dusty scent, except for the sheets on the bed, which smell like detergent, as though he or an auntie just washed them in preparation for whoever might end up in his bed. Hyerim cannot sleep here. This is an agreement she made with him. It wasn’t ever stated. It was understood. 

She lies back down and curls herself around herself. An hour ago she put her ankles over Nichkhun’s shoulders and forgot about everything for a little while. Nothing else in her head. Nothing else in her heart. Now the other things rush back to her mind, swarming around her like flies. Every time she brushes them away, they land in the same spot. Her phone lights up every time it goes dark, silently reminding her to check the ongoing conversation between her band members as they discuss just what the success of their new single means for their corporate future. She doesn’t pick up the phone.

Nichkhun comes out of the bathroom, the reflected glow of city light carving itself into his body. His eyes are soft, and she feels a numbness course over her skin, tracing the places he so recently touched. He always touches her like he’s thinking about someone else, but it’s not like she didn’t know what to expect from him, when she agreed to this.

“Do you want me to drive you home?” he asks.

She finds her voice after a long moment. “No,” she says. “It’s not late. I can walk.”

He considers this, frowning at her the same way he frowns at the younger idols in their company when he’s doling out unsolicited but nevertheless cherished advice. An hour ago he’d looked at her differently, a dark hunger lurking in his eyes, but that Nichkhun is gone now. She feels like her sternum could crack with all the pressure weighing down on her chest.

“It’s not safe,” he says finally, tightening his grip on the towel modestly wrapped around his waist.

Still naked, she reaches for her dress, a free sample that had been too big for Sunmi.

“It’s fine,” Hyerim says. “I’m not that popular. No one will bother me.”

  
  
  


She goes into the public restroom at the subway stop outside his house. The employees at a cell phone case shop look at her as she passes, but they don’t say anything, even if they recognize her. She locks herself in a stall with a Western-style toilet and tells herself she won’t do it. She isn’t keen on it, especially not the way it rips up her throat. This isn’t her preference, not when so much more can be achieved by the careful, methodical reduction of intake and the intense achievement earned from hours at the gym. But she hates herself and shoving her fingers into her throat feels like a sweet punishment for all the things that she hates about herself. Suddenly the evening is removed from her body, as though everything about him has been purged with the food, and she flushes it away and wipes sweat from her forehead with a square of toilet tissue. 

She exits the stall and stares at herself for a minute in the shadowed reflection of the large bathroom mirror. Her eyes are bloodshot, the special soothing drops used by the makeup artist long since worn off. Her hair is still matted with hairspray to keep it curled. She does not look like an idol at all. Then again, after all this time, she still knows where she stands in this group: least popular. Awkward. Untalented. Ugly. She reads all the comments, in spite of her better judgment. She washes her hands and wipes off her mouth.

  
  
  


When she first joined the group, she had the biggest, starry-eyed crush on Nichkhun, and thankfully, a strong enough sense of self-preservation not to tell anyone else.

The Wonder Girls were idols to her, although she’d known them for years. She joined the company just after their debut and saw them on occasion. Even with caked-on makeup and high heels, they lacked the sheen that idols would come to have in later years. They were just girls, and she recognized this, but also revered them. At that time, you couldn’t step outside without hearing “Tell Me” playing somewhere. Their faces were on everything, their voices on every channel, and everyone Hyerim met wanted to know what they were really like.

After she joined the group, her mindset took time to change. She had a few months of practice and then they were on tour, walking around big American cities with the 2PM oppas, who talked to her more than her own group members ever did.

“It takes time,” Nichkhun explained to her in an airport, sitting next to her on a creaky, uncomfortable row of seats. He nodded to where the other four Wonder Girls, the real Wonder Girls, stood across the hall. “Sunye has so much to think about with her dad—”

“She’s always nice to me,” Hyerim interjected, uncomfortable with the implication that she’d resented her leader and the second most popular Wonder Girl for anything.

“But it’s hard for her to invest, in anyone, right now. It’s okay to be upset.” He nudged her, and she blushed, feeling heat ricochet through her body. “Yeeun is just all in her head, and that’s not personal either, but she’s going to push you to be better and she doesn’t have a lot of tact. Yubin is Yubin, and Sohee—well.”

He shrugged. Hyerim didn’t say anything, unable to articulate how Sohee’s constant jabs and cold attitude made her feel. Yesterday Sohee had made fun of her hair, and Yubin had laughed, so Hyerim just laughed along with them.

“Sohee misses Sunmi,” he continued. “And Sohee is used to being the center of attention.”

“But she’s so quiet,” Hyerim said, for lack of anything better to say. She had a feeling that her life would have been much easier if Sohee had been the one who left, and Sunmi the one who stayed.

“Being quiet or loud isn’t what makes you popular,” Nichkhun said.

“Then what is it?”

He laughed good-naturedly. “Talent and charisma,” he teased. “And if you don’t have that, good looks.”

  
  
  


Outside the door to her apartment, she realizes she smells like him. His cologne is unbearably strong, lingering in her nose. She still feels the after-effects of friction between her legs as she unlocks the door, the odd coiling at the base of her stomach, the uncontrollable urge to curl herself around herself and try to forget. But it is addictive; she will think about him when she tries to sleep. 

She opens the door of her apartment and her keys clatter. It is silent, but not dark. The television is on, playing a music show. Someone must have had it on to watch their performance from the morning, but the living room is empty now.

She goes into the kitchen for something to eat because her stomach is clenched with an uncomfortable pain and she isn’t good enough to make it through the night without food. She is really a sorry excuse for an idol, and she knows it. 

She stops short as she crosses into the room. In front of her is Sohee, sitting at the kitchen table with her back to her, her long black hair hanging like a sheet down her back. She turns her head but doesn’t look at Hyerim or say anything. Hyerim finds the vegetables and rice she cooked yesterday and sits down at the table with Sohee, refusing to relinquish the room. Sohee is often here but usually to see Sunmi; it’s odd to find her here alone.

“You smell like cologne,” Sohee says, her nose wrinkling. 

Hyerim shrugs and forces herself to take a bite. Each bite is calories scratching down her sore throat, and she will look disgusting on screen tomorrow. But each bite is also energy, and if she can go to the gym for an hour in the morning, then maybe it will all cancel out. 

“Is it Nichkhun-oppa?” Sohee asks. 

Hyerim freezes. She doesn’t dare look up from her food.

“I heard it from Hyunjung-unnie,” Sohee continues, referencing one of their managers. “Who said she saw his text message pop up on your screen.” 

Outside the window, Hyerim can see the square windows of light of other people’s apartments. She focuses on this for a minute, trying to speak without gagging on her last bite of food.

“No,” she finally manages.

“You’re a terrible liar, Hyerim,” Sohee scoffs, visibly disgusted.

Hyerim adjusts her grip on her chopsticks. In one window, a person appears as a silhouette, momentarily carved out in light before they pull the curtains closed. 

“Please don’t tell the others,” Hyerim says in a thin voice. Her hands feel cold and she shifts her gaze to the peeling edge of paint on her thumbnail, unable to look up. If the others knew—she can already imagine their looks of disapproval. And worse than that, pity. Even if she insisted that she was only interested in a friend-with-benefits, her band members wouldn’t believe her. After all, Yubin was the one who found the folder of Nichkhun photos on Hyerim’s laptop back in the day, saved under the title _My Boyfriend _ _ (*^3^)/~☆ _.

Sohee looks at her, tracing a finger around the edge of her glass. She lifts her eyebrows, derisive.

Before she can say anything, the door of the apartment bangs open, and Sunmi’s voice floats through the living room. “The delivery kid wanted my autograph!”

They both turn to watch Sunmi shuffle into the kitchen in her slippers, a large plastic bag hanging from each arm. Hyerim’s stomach turns with nausea as the greasy scent of fried chicken and fries reaches her nose. Sunmi drops the bags on the table and shoves her hip against Sohee’s side, demanding her to share half of her seat.

“You’re home!” she says happily to Hyerim, opening one of the boxes and breaking a chicken strip in half. Steam rises above it. “We didn’t know where you went.”

“I had to go exercise,” Hyerim says smoothly. Sohee snorts. Sunmi doesn’t bat an eye, instead shoving a whole chicken strip into her mouth. 

“The sacrifices we make as celebrities,” Sunmi laments. She scowls at her boxes of food, and starts in on another chicken strip. Sohee nibbles primly on a french fry, her gaze heavy on Hyerim, as if to say _ I made no promises. _ “What have you guys been talking about?”

“2PM,” Sohee says. Hyerim chokes a little on her food, and Sohee gives her a catlike smile before continuing. “If there’s no money for you guys to make another comeback this year, do you think there will be money for 2PM?”

Sunmi makes a scoffing sound in her throat. “Don’t bring that up!” she says, preparing to launch into the rant that has fueled her and Yeeun’s conversations for the past week. Hyerim excuses herself to her room. She doesn’t want to think about money, or her career, or the future, and she definitely doesn't want to give Sohee more opportunities to torture her.

On the day she moved into this apartment, Hyerim had pasted a collage of photos on the wall of her bedroom. Most of the pictures are professional shots of scenery. Some of the pictures remind her to be happy: a photo of her smiling family sits in the middle, taken at her father’s taekwondo training center. At that time, she’d been expecting to debut with Fei and Jia, and she imagined her career had limitless potential. Beside that photo is a picture of the six Wonder Girls, taken before Sunye’s wedding, with Hyerim herself near the center, her arm looped through Sunye’s. And then there are the aspirational photos, pictures of tree-like models floating down New York City streets, their tiny waists cinched with expensive belts, their faces angular, almost holy. The only vision for the future she can currently stomach is the one where she finally looks like one of them.

She looks at the photos as though approaching a shrine. She thinks about how she'd looked in the monitor when they ran backstage to watch the playback this morning. Her face had been blown up to gargantuan proportions, and was now accessible around the world. It's a reminder that the only thing she can control is the size of her body on the screen. Everything else looms ahead of her, a misty unknown.

  
  
  


She can’t fall asleep. Every time she closes her eyes, she imagines exactly what the others would say. _ You can’t be with him, _ Yeeun would say. _ You’re too good for him! _ She wouldn’t mean the opposite but it would be implied in the words: Hyerim is not Nichkhun’s equal in fame nor appearance. She already knows this. And anyway, Hyerim would have to reply _ I’m not really with him _ and then the others would ask why she agreed to a compromise her younger self never would have suffered.

If she’s smart, she could end it now. It’s not like he would miss her or question her. At best, she has a few more months before word gets around. No one likes gossip better than celebrities, after all.

She and Sohee have never been close, and will never be close, but she doesn’t think Sohee will betray her to the others, at least not without a strong impetus. She doesn’t exactly trust Sohee to be kind, but she does trust her to be fair.

Once, when Hyerim had first joined the group, Sohee found her crying in the dusty back room of one of the venues on their US tour. “What’s wrong?” she demanded, pulling Hyerim’s laptop out of her hands. She surveyed the English words on the screen for a moment, then looked up. “What does ‘Down’s syndrome’ mean?”

Hyerim calmed down through the act of explaining, with as much tact as she could muster, that some self-proclaimed Sunmi fans had posted fancams with the caption “Why’d they let a Down’s syndrome girl into the Wonder Girls?” and gone on to make fun of everything from Hyerim’s appearance to her voice to the way the other four ignored her on stage.

Sohee glared at the laptop screen, then closed out of the window. “If they think that’s an insult, then you know exactly what kind of people they are,” she said, with an air of finality that made her seem much older than eighteen.

Hyerim wiped tears off her cheeks with the heel of her hand. She had no delusions of greatness; she was spending half of each tour just trying to keep up with the choreography, something Park Jinyoung reminded her of often. But she’d had some hopes in all this. She wanted to be famous.

As if reading her mind, Sohee looked up at her again. “This _ is _ what it’s like being famous,” she said.

“It doesn’t get better?”

Sohee shrugged. “If you’re lucky,” she said softly, her eyes unfocused on the darkened laptop screen, “they forget to keep hating you.”

  
  
  
  


_ I wanna go out _

_ I wanna have fun _

_ I wanna dance all night, party all night _

_ Leave me alone _

_ —Wonder Girls, “Oppa” _

  
  


“See what you’d think is, if we make good profits, they should guarantee us _ something, _ ” Yeeun says, exasperated. “But— _ no! _ How could they _ possibly _ make us any promises when everyone has to think about _ Twice?” _

It’s her soapbox of the week, and not an unworthy one, though Hyerim has been trying not to think about it. She sits down on the floor of the dance practice room and begins stretching, feeling her makeup heavy on her skin.

In front of her, Yubin is doing crunches in preparation for the video they’re about to film. “It’s not Twice’s fault,” she says, noncommittal.

“And that’s the _ other _ thing!” Yeeun turns on her, jabbing a finger into the air. “If I mention Twice at _ all _ , it’s like I’m some terrible, jealous bitch. ‘You have to take care of your dongsaengs.’ Who said I’m not taking care of them? I’m complaining that the company can only seem to invest in _ one _ girl group at a time now, which by the way, Twice doesn't even know about, so how does me complaining about shitty business decisions mean that I’m just jealous?”

Hyerim glances at Yubin, who gives her a brief, tight smile between crunches. Their manager, an old and sympathetic friend, doesn’t even look up from her phone.

“What if,” Hyerim says tentatively, “we just enjoy the success we have right now?”

Yeeun’s nostrils flare. “There’s always going to be something else, though. If you accept only what they give you, they’ll take even that away in the end. You enjoy it. I can’t.”

Hyerim averts her gaze. Yeeun’s words, as they often do, sting with truth.

Sunmi comes into the room with their other manager, a brand-new guy who took the job at JYPE to supplement his career as a personal trainer. He’s handsome, with tattoos covering both arms, and Sunmi has a kind of praying mantis look in her eyes whenever he’s around. Hyerim keeps her mouth shut.

“Time to work,” Sunmi croons, raking her hand back through her hair. “Can Business Yeeun let Sexy Yeeun sub in for a bit?”

Yeeun rolls her eyes, but she straightens her shoulders, too. Hyerim pushes aside the fears Yeeun was just ranting about; after all, they can’t control the future, even if Yeeun makes a thousand presentations to the company. The bureaucratic processes click forward whether the four of them are obsessing over the outcomes or not.

Hyerim stands up, coming up beside Sunmi in front of the mirror. Sunmi pouts her bottom lip out, just a bit, as she leans her head against Hyerim’s shoulder.

“We still aren’t sexy,” she says, with an exaggerated sigh. “I want to look like Yubin.”

“You’re sexy,” Hyerim says with as much enthusiasm as she can muster. The obvious reality stares back at them from the mirror: only one member of their group has fallen short of their new look, and it isn’t Sunmi. All the botox in the world can’t shape Hyerim’s lips into the perfect sultry pout.

Sunmi sighs. “Not sexy enough to get anyone to guarantee us another comeback this year,” she says with a giggle that could be mistaken as naive, but Hyerim can see the hard knife of ambition flash across her eyes.

Hyerim takes her place in their starting line-up. The music starts, and she empties her mind of everything except choreography and completing this single task.

  
  
  


As a trainee, Hyerim occasionally saw Yeeun walking through the hallways of the company building. She was legendary among the trainees, if only because they all envied her immediate debut after auditioning. And it wasn’t only that—she was close with 2PM and 2AM, spoke her opinions loudly, and carried herself like she owned the company. The Wonder Girls may have been created for Sunye, but it doesn’t surprise Hyerim at all that Yeeun was the only one to last from the beginning to now.

“The issue is that we don’t have enough power,” Yeeun says, as the two of them drift through a convenience store near their apartment, her laser-sharp eyes focused on the visions dancing through her imagination. “We can’t force them to do what we want them to do. We can’t change everything.” 

Hyerim heard once that Yeeun had argued against Hyerim replacing Sunmi, insisting that she wasn’t good enough. Hyerim has never asked if that rumor is true, preferring not to base their relationship on anything except everything that has happened in the seven years between then and now.

“We could sue,” Hyerim says, noncommittal. “Claim they haven’t fulfilled the terms of our contract.”

Yeeun snorts. “Yeah. That would go well for us. And technically, they have.”

Hyerim nods. JYP Entertainment is occasionally a well-run company, executing good ideas with efficiency. It is more often a bureaucratic disaster zone, with every department in some way creating obstacles for other departments to overcome. As an organized person herself, Hyerim long ago learned to stay focused on only that which she could control. Yeeun, on the other hand, could never quite shake the belief that all she needed to do was have one more conversation with the right people for them to do what she wanted. 

“Or we go to another company,” Hyerim continues as she picks up a bottle of zero calorie soda. It will make her bloat, but it takes the edge off her headaches. “Which would give us leverage.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Yeeun says. She turns down another aisle, picking up a box of condoms and placing it in her basket. “You know it would kill PD-nim.”

Hyerim follows Yeeun down another aisle. She still feels confused, sometimes, by the invisible web of loyalties netting everyone she knows together, until they’re pulled so tightly, no one can breathe. “What is he doing for us right now, though?”

Yeeun doesn’t say anything. She takes a box of cookies off the display, even though she’s been on a diet for months, and tosses it into her basket. Hyerim suddenly flashes back to an image of Yeeun in the recording studio, when they were working on her solo project. She’d stood over the soundboard like a general looking at a map, plotting her best course. She would never truly be able to bear the disgrace of defeat.

“One day,” she says, turning to look at Hyerim, “I’m going to be in charge of something. And I’m going to do things the right way.”

No matter how they may feel, they’re up before dawn the next day, anyway. Hyerim staggers into the van that pulls up to their apartment and falls asleep with her head against the cool glass window. The air outside feels heavy with humidity. She wakes up when they stop in front of the salon. Everything after that happens in brief flashes of wakefulness in between zombie-like exhaustion. She avoids her own reflection in the mirror, focusing instead on scrolling mindlessly through inspirational Instagram accounts on her phone. Someone gives her an all-natural smoothie, which she forces down. Sunmi laughs loudly somewhere behind her. The hairspray the stylist uses smells like the same kind the stylists used on the set of their ill-fated Wonder Girls movie, and she half-dreams of Los Angeles sunshine, Starbucks skinny lattes, and unfulfilled promises.

When they reemerge, the sun sits high in a blue sky. Their manager remembers what he’s supposed to be doing and rushes them into the van, where the air conditioner is turned high to keep their hair and makeup set. Hyerim sits up primly, listening to the rattle of noise around her and trying to keep herself from falling back asleep and messing up her hair.

In the broadcast studio, they sit around in their waiting room and listen to other groups’ sound checks. Hyerim watches as Yubin cuts a fried egg into one centimeter strips in her store-bought breakfast bowl. 

“I still hate my nose,” she says conversationally, flipping her dry blonde hair over her shoulder. “It looks too big.” 

“It doesn’t,” Sunmi returns enthusiastically, polishing off the last of her rice in her box meal. She looks over at Hyerim and gestures to the box of food sitting half-finished on the table in front of her. Hyerim hands it over, absently wondering just how much Sunmi has already had to eat today. Half-finished is generous, actually; about three-fourths still remains.

“I was thinking about going to this clinic Taeyeon recommended,” Yubin continues.

“I _ love _ Taeyeon,” Sunmi says.

“I know,” Yubin laughs.

Hyerim wonders if she could evaporate and no one would notice. The conversation continues; Sunmi leaves the room and Yeeun returns and Yubin begins doing yoga in a corner, and none of them speak to Hyerim. She pulls out her phone to send a text to Nichkhun, his name now wisely changed to read _ Nate _, in the hopes that she could pass him off as a foreigner friend without anyone thinking twice about it. As the days go by, she worries less that Sohee will tell the others, but her own stupidity weighs heavily on her.

_ Are you free— _ she begins, then deletes it. It’s silly, but he’s usually the one who initiates, inviting her over to his house with a polite message. He’s more polite than the (two) guys she’s actually dated, and she tries not to let herself read into that.

“Girls, you’re on standby,” comes a voice from the hall.

_ Have you watched our performance? _ she texts instead, and then leaps up, chilled in her thin costume. Their managers move around in a flurry, pinning microphones and reviewing schedules. Sunmi rushes back into the room as the others begin to leave, before Hyerim can move from her spot.

“Just a second,” Sunmi calls out, sailing backwards in the room as Yeeun and Yubin go through the door with the staff. Hidden in the corner, Hyerim is the only one to see her pull out a bottle of thick foundation and shake it and then blend it into the skin on her fingers until some bruises are blurred out. She inspects her work, and seems to approve, then looks up at her reflection, and sighs. She leaves the room without realizing Hyerim is still there.

Hyerim hesitates, anchoring herself with a hand against the wall. It’s not like she didn’t know, but sometimes she tries not to believe in the evidence that they’re all the same—the four of them, and everyone else hooked on fame. But she knows. And honestly, there’s nothing to say.

  
  
  


Once, a long time ago now, she’d gone to the bathroom of a performance venue and found Yubin standing at the sink, clothed in only her bra and safety shorts while she scrubbed at the neck of her costume. Their eyes met in the mirror, and Yubin gave her a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“I got something on it,” she explained. She looked like she’d been caught in a terrible act.

“Unnie—”

“Can you go grab me a hair dryer?”

Obediently, Hyerim rushed back to their waiting room and returned with the hair dryer. At the time she was naive, clueless as to what she was witnessing and why her normally warm, attentive friend looked like she was drifting somewhere far away. Pale yellow flecks were just visible around the neckline of her shirt.

“You know what it’s like,” Yubin said, in the tone of casual conversation, “when you go online and you read the mean comments?”

“Who would say anything about you?” Hyerim asked, incredulous.

Yubin gave a tight smile. The unflappable, effortlessly cool rapper had faded away, and she seemed very small, standing there under dim fluorescent lights. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” she said softly.

At a loss, Hyerim slid an arm around Yubin’s shoulders, and held on as she began to cry.

  
  
  


As they take the stage with other artists at the end of the show, Hyerim steels herself to lose, and thinks about the odd predicament of this career path. She tries to imagine what would happen if any one of them went to the public with a full account of everything that happens behind the screens—not an edited account designed to woo support, but a complete list of all the ways even the most gilded idol can be hollow at their core.

And all for what? They are all running after a goal that vanishes as soon as you catch it. Once Hyerim’s goal was just to debut, and then she debuted and her goal was to be accepted by the fans of her new group, and then their goal became to make good music, and now they have come to the end of a race clutching their sides and find out that even the most dazzling sales wouldn’t be likely to save them now. And what does that mean, for the four of them?

Yeeun grabs her arm, and suddenly Hyerim realizes that the hosts have called out “Wonder Girls!” They’ve won.

Someone hands her the trophy. While Yubin makes the acceptance speech, half in tears, Hyerim stares into the audience, trying to see the faces of the fans. She smiles at the right moments but spaces out otherwise, once again wondering about them, why they’re here and what they expect. What did she expect? To be beloved? Revered? To be just like BoA or even the Wonder Girls before she was one, glamorized and idolized, less a human than a character? To ascend to the heights of fame, unburdened by her own disgusting imperfections? As if the stage lights wouldn’t throw all of it into sharp relief?

Yeeun pinches her lightly in her side, bringing her back to reality. Hyerim comes back to herself. For this moment, at least, they are the winners. The pinnacle of success.

  
  
  


After they win, everything happens in a blur just as it had in the morning. Hyerim hustles off stage and back to the dressing room, where they pose with the trophy and post to their social media accounts. She selects a selca where she looks the least fat, and posts a dashed-off caption that she hopes makes sense. Then they are whisked to a radio show, and then finally the day is over and they stagger down the sidewalk toward their apartment building’s front door. In all this time, Nichkhun has not texted her back. Fortunately, she does not care, not even a little bit.

“We should go celebrate!” Yubin announces as they step into the elevator. “When was the last time we went out?”

Sunmi looks dead on her feet, and Yeeun is absorbed in her phone. Yubin frowns.

“I’ll go with you,” Hyerim says, utterly exhausted but dreading the moment when she walks back into her bedroom and has to lie down and listen to the silence.

  
  
  


It used to be different, or it didn’t. Maybe it’s always in flux. When Hyerim joined, the group was fractured: a tenuous alliance forming between Yubin and Sohee, and a united purpose between Yeeun and Sunye. A long history of understanding between Sunye and Sohee, and a genuine affection between Yeeun and Yubin. And a large question mark for Hyerim.

Then things shifted. Yeeun thrived in America, taking to the country like her extroverted soul finally had found enough room to breathe. Sohee persevered. Yubin coasted. Sunye suffered. Hyerim tried. They were, at least, bound together by a shared destiny, the five of them uprooted and replanted in unknown soil on the off-chance they might flourish and grow leaves of limitless money. 

There wasn’t enough money. There is never enough money. There wasn’t enough money long before they gave up on America, long before they recorded songs that never got released, long before Sunye got married and Sohee swore never to sing again. There wasn’t enough money for anyone to do much anything except retreat and lick their wounds.

In the idle time, Hyerim likes to think the world took on a golden hue. Sunmi both craved and dispensed affection so lavishly that the axis of the group could not help but reorient towards her. Suddenly they were catapulted forward by her enthusiasm, learning instruments and dreaming about a glorious future, where the name of 원더걸스 really meant something again, and destiny had been redirected toward something new. They stood together like the four points of a compass, precariously balanced, Sunmi pointing due north toward a goal that half the time Hyerim couldn’t quite see. And now, after everything, there still isn’t enough money.

It used to be different. Or it didn’t.

  
  
  


Three hours later, it’s the dead of night and she’s almost drunk.

Her ears ring and everything seems to tilt away from her. The only clear thought in her mind, as she sinks down onto the curb of the road and lets her stilettos rest in the gutter, is that she has nowhere to go. She is fairly sure she isn’t drunk, though, at least not on alcohol, but she’s dimly aware she drank on an empty stomach and maybe she’s drunk. God, she just wants to sleep, right here on the sidewalk.

She hasn’t seen Yubin in an hour. Maybe less, maybe more. Why did she agree to come here? She feels like a spy without a purpose, trying on identities in search of some elusive secret that she can trade for stability. Today she is the kind of girl who goes out at two in the morning and drinks while entering the calories into the app on her phone and feels surprised when the road tilts under her feet. Tomorrow she will be the kind of girl who gets up and spends three hours in the gym and then goes to church with her mother, without a hint of a hangover. The day after that she will be an idol, glamorous and pristine, barely saying a word.

She opens her phone and types _ why don’t you love me _, but she is not quite drunk enough to send it. She wonders briefly if she loves Nichkhun and supposes she doesn’t. She just wanted him so badly she confused herself. She used to have this big romantic dream of her future husband and their four perfect children, all living in a large beautiful apartment somewhere only the rich and famous could afford to live. She’d imagined that her real life would begin on her wedding day with a romantic crescendo. And then she got old enough to realize she was just as stupid as everyone had always said. But right now she can’t remember if Nichkhun caused that realization, or came after it. Maybe it didn’t matter.

She sits on the curb until Yubin emerges, her arm linked with a girl she doesn’t recognize. Yubin’s smile changes, fading at the corners as she teeters over on her $500 platform shoes and squats down, running her palm over Hyerim’s hair. 

“I’ll take you home,” she says, in a motherly tone Hyerim recognizes as a unique voice just for her, Yubin’s pretend child, reluctantly adopted, now coddled. Sometimes she wonders if she and Yubin will be the only ones left, eventually, oldest and youngest, the two least sure of their footing in the world. 

  
  
  


Yubin drops her off and then drives off into the night. It starts to sprinkle as Hyerim stands there, staring up at an airplane passing through the night. She goes inside.

The apartment is dark. The windows are open. The scent of rain hangs in the air. Wind billows inside the curtains Yubin hung up, the curtains that are too small to fully cover the windows, because she didn’t measure them, and none of them have gone back looking for more that will actually fit. 

Hyerim goes to close the window and lingers for a moment, breathing in the exhaust fumes and humidity languishing in the air. Then she closes the window. The curtains fall still. 

She turns and sees a faint light coming from the open door of Sunmi’s room. She is drawn to it, thinking of angler fish in the deep ocean, _ Finding Nemo _, other things she used to care to think about. 

In the room, Sunmi lies on her bed, lit only by the glow of her phone. She does not seem to notice Hyerim in her doorway. There is a bottle of wine silhouetted on the bedside table. There are candy wrappers strewn across the floor. She looks at Hyerim. The window beside her is open. Rain spatters on the glass, visible in the reflection. Hyerim goes and closes it.

“We won today,” Sunmi says softly, sounding very unlike herself. The room spins and lengthens. Hyerim feels like she is drifting far away, like the moment when Nemo swims past the drop off and all he can see is a vast blue ocean, fathomless, unimaginable.

“We did,” she says as brightly as she can manage. There are more candy wrappers in the bed. Sunmi looks like the perfect idol, though, aglow in moonlight, her hair draped like a mermaid’s over the pillow. No one would ever believe the truth.

“We deserve it,” Sunmi says. “We deserve more.”

Then she slips into sleep, and Hyerim is left alone, standing in the dark.

  
  


In the morning, Hyerim climbs out of bed and sees stars flash before her eyes. A split-second of infinity later and she is on her knees, looking at the polyester threads of her fake sheepskin rug and gasping for breath, trying to recover those missing seconds between when she was standing and now. She waits for her thoughts to come back. She waits until she can put a hand on the side of her bed and pull herself up on shaky legs to sit on the edge and try to recover herself.

Everything is fine.

  
  
  
  
  


_ 위기는 곧 기회 상처는 갑옷이 돼 _

_ No one can break it, I guard my heart, do you see that? _

_ —Ha:tfelt ft. Hyerim, “Iron Girl” _

  
  


A few weeks after they wrap on “Why So Lonely” promotions, Hyerim is sitting in a chair at the cosmetic doctor’s office, her mouth totally numb as she waits for another injection of lip fillers that she has suddenly realized she does not want or need. 

The realization creeps over her, leaving her paralyzed and her mind numb as numb as her mouth. She almost doesn’t recognize her own reflection in the black screen of her phone.

She taps her fingers against the arms of the chair, trying to bring feeling back into her stunned body. On the television screen above her, a Twice music video ends, and a Girl’s Generation video begins. Tiffany’s face fills the screen, as if to remind patients what they’re in this office to look like. Of course, no amount of surgery can fix a faulty canvas.

Hyerim sits there watching it for a solid minute. And then, contrary to everything in her nature, she gets up and walks out.

  
  
  
  


She’s not in love.

In love would be—something else. Stability and certainty. The confidence to call him up on the drive home and yell at him over the phone. Emotional intimacy. The absence of shame.

And she knows what she’s doing. She drives to his house through a summer rainstorm because she has spent ten years of her life running toward a finish line that keeps moving, and she was too weak to keep running when a shortcut presented itself.

It happened like this: it was a late night. They’d met with mutual friends, fellow JYP artists, over a late-night McDonald’s run. Hyerim picked at her food, pinching the hamburger bun into tiny pieces. She remembers that Jae was next to her and he scarfed down two hamburgers in quick succession, which made her want to puke, and Bernard asked her if everything was okay and she answered _ yes _ in such a crystal-clear tone it surprised even her. Nichkhun offered to drive her home, and she agreed even though she’d driven too, but it seemed worth it to tell a little white lie in exchange for a few seconds spent alone with a crush she’d never really gotten over.

Something hummed between them in the car; she was too naive and too used to being ignored to recognize it for what it was even after he asked if she wanted to go back to his house. She didn’t dare hope for anything until she followed him inside the door to his house and there in the dark he stopped, so tall and unfathomably handsome, and asked if he could kiss her.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. He touched her cheek, her jaw. Leaned down and pressed his lips against hers. Slid his tongue into her mouth. She wavered, uncertain, then answered.

They kissed and kissed until they were in his bed and he suddenly froze, rolling off of her and saying _ I’m sorry, I can’t do this, I’m not ready, I’m so sorry _ and she knew he meant it. Knew it was only a few months since he ended an unofficially-five-year relationship. His pants, visibly tented, suggested a war within his body, one he was just barely winning.

She had such clarity in that moment. This was her identity—the girl who got taken to bed but left wanting, who debuted but remained unpopular, who became a star only to be ridiculed. Every dream of hers was fulfilled only in the most unsatisfying sense.

And so she said _ it’s okay, I’m not looking for a relationship, I just want to have fun _ and he believed her and maybe she believed herself, too. Or she believed that this was as good as she was going to get, so why hold onto the dreams she’d nursed since she was too young to know better? Why hold out for something that would never come? 

He sat still. She traced the lines of his beautiful, famous face with her eyes, noting the dark stubble on his jaw and the raised pimple on his neck. He reached out to her, finger tips shivering across her bare skin. She was willing to be a body to be used. She was a virgin tired of waiting, tired of longing, tired of hoping for something better than this.

_ Are you sure? _ he asked.

_ I’m sure_, she answered. He kissed her gingerly, asking a question without words. Like she’d been doing for her whole career, she performed without talent or finesse, and took off his shirt. His hands searched the bare skin under her dress and she spread her legs and took whatever he would give.

This was what she wanted. This was all she ever wanted.

  
  
  


Two days later she looks at her face in her phone camera while she waits for Sunye to meet her at a sunny cafe in Itaewon. She really should have stayed for the injections—her lips look grotesquely thin in the screen, and it will be months before she can get in to see that doctor again, but she doesn’t want to risk using a second-rate doctor like the one who left Sunmi’s lips so bruised a few years ago that no amount of makeup could quite cover it.

Sunye comes in with the sunshine glowing behind her like a cheesy effect in a low-budget drama. But her smile as she runs up to hug Hyerim is real and vibrant, and Hyerim feels a familiar twinge of regret as they sit down. Sometimes she wishes that Sunye had never left, for reasons she can’t quite articulate. She tries not to feel jealous when Sunye texts pictures of her kids to their group chat, but she does feel jealous—or maybe she’s just resentful that it was so easy for her to walk away. She’s never been able to puzzle out her own feelings, or has been unwilling to look that closely. In the end, there is a reason Sunye is the only person in the industry besides Jia that she has ever called her sister.

They look over the menu while Sunye answers Hyerim’s questions about her new baby. Hyerim tries to stay focused on the conversation while she adds up calorie counts in her head, but it’s hard, and after an unknown length of time, she notices that Sunye has gotten quiet.

“Are you okay?” Sunye asks.

“I’m fine,” Hyerim says quickly, her face morphing into a practiced _ who, me? _ expression.

Sunye doesn’t look convinced. Hyerim chews at her lip and attempts to redirect the conversation back to Sunye. She doesn’t want Sunye to ask her any more questions. The first one felt like pressing on a bruise, and more would be torture.

The waiter comes to take their order. Sunye literally just birthed a child and yet she is as thin as ever, her picture-perfect bone structure perhaps even more defined. She’d been the same after her first, quickly dropping the baby weight, which she attributed to breastfeeding. Hyerim doesn’t know enough to know if that’s true, but for Sunye it probably would be. Sunye fought for everything she achieved, but a few things—beauty, at least—came naturally.

“And for you?”

It takes Hyerim a moment to realize the waiter has just addressed her. She shakes herself, wondering where this jealousy is coming from, and orders a salad, dressing on the side. She can feel Sunye’s eyes on her as the waiter takes their menus and walks away.

“Isn’t your promotion season over?” Sunye asks.

“The JYP Nation concert is coming up,” Hyerim answers.

“Hmm.” Sunye sips on her water, eyes drifting to look out the window. The sun reflects off her hair. They used to go out for breakfast, just the two of them, in whatever city they happened to be in at the time. Hyerim remembers how it started, sometime late in 2010, when she’d confessed on an overnight plane to feeling like she’d never fit in with them. Sunye was making paper cranes out of magazine pages. _ That’s my fault _ , she’d said. _ I’ll do better _. It wasn’t her fault—it was Hyerim’s fault for being a loser—but she’d made it her responsibility. Hyerim will never forget that.

“Yeeun doesn’t want to renew her contract with the company,” Hyerim offers, desperate for another topic. “Or, she’s thinking about it.”

Sunye’s eyebrows lift. “I don’t blame her.”

“Sunmi thinks it would devastate PD-nim.”

“He’s hardly the only one to be thinking about.” Sunye sighs.

Hyerim taps her fingernails against her glass. Sunye is right and she is wrong. It’s always been like this, difficult to discern the lines of obligation and responsibility in a job that demands your soul and your body, too. Sunye always played by the rules, though, up until she didn’t.

Sunye glances around. “You don’t look well, Limmie,” she says quietly, a motherly concern softening her gaze. “Are you eating?”

Hyerim feels the knife go directly into her chest. She cannot answer this question. The previous months stand out in sharp relief. She has whittled down her daily intake to the bare minimum, a constant deficit, and watched her bones become visible, though not enough. Everyone looks worse on camera, especially her, and if Sunye takes this away from her—she’ll collapse, she’s sure, because she _ needs _ this. She needs to feel hunger gnawing at her stomach because she still isn’t good enough. When she loses a few more kilos, she’ll stop, of course. Of course. 

But Sunye is looking at her like she can see all the way through her. Hyerim cannot let her take this, not _ this _, not the only thing she has when she has nothing. It’s her only refuge.

Her only option is to surrender something else in exchange.

“I’m just unhappy,” she says, unable to meet Sunye’s eyes. “I’ve been sleeping with Khun-oppa.”

A long silence spreads between them. Hyerim looks up, expecting to see disbelief or disgust, but Sunye’s face is blank.

“Friends with benefits,” Hyerim says, feeling strangely worldly next to her married friend. “No one else knows.”

Sunye looks out the window again. There used to be rumors on all the Internet forums about who the Wonder Girls were sleeping around with. For Sunye, none of them were true. _ Be careful who you trust, _ she’d told Hyerim when she joined the group. _ Just because he acts nice doesn’t mean he is nice. It’s not safe to be alone with men you don’t know. _

_ What about the 2PM-oppas? _ Hyerim had asked, often imagining a scenario where she ran into Nichkhun at a hotel pool or backstage in a dressing room.

_ Just be careful, _ Sunye had said. _ It’s hard to know who you can trust in this industry. _

“But you’re unhappy,” Sunye says, her gaze landing heavily on Hyerim again.

Hyerim shrugs. Her chest feels tight. “I thought it would be different.” She swallows down the sudden lump in her throat. “I thought all of this would be different.”

The past slams hard into the present. Poor little seventeen-year-old Hyerim, walking into a stuffy office and being told her project group was cancelled and she’d be joining the Wonder Girls. Standing on stage and thinking the fans would accept her when she was so large and untalented and awkward. Writing her songs and figuring this would be enough to get recognition, as if anyone looks twice at a girl without beauty. Believing that the dream required nothing more than positive thinking and perseverance.

“You know what I realized after I left?” Sunye asks. Her voice seems strangely far away, like Hyerim is watching her on a screen. “I realized that as long as I was here, I could never be happy. Not really.”

“I thought you were happy,” Hyerim says, accusatory. Her voice sounds like someone else’s.

“Sometimes.” Sunye shrugs, twisting her fingers around her wedding ring. “I know it feels like you have all these responsibilities—to the group, to PD-nim, to the fans—but maybe, you have to save yourself. Maybe you're the only one you can save.”

Hyerim stares at the table. A stripe of sunlight illuminates Sunye’s hands, her rings glinting in the glow. “I thought you were going to lecture me on sleeping with Khun-oppa.”

Sunye sighs again. “Khun is a symptom,” she says softly. “He’s not what’s wrong.”

  
  
  
  
  


The Wonder Girls’ 2010 US tour did not grind to a halt when Sunye’s father died unexpectedly. It paused, briefly, and then in a blink of an eye they were back in North America, singing their hearts out and pretending nothing was wrong. Hyerim will always remember that moment she realized Sunye was not going to take any time off, and when she mentioned it, Yeeun said “we can’t afford that” in a clipped tone. At the time Hyerim didn’t fully understand what this meant—that half the members of her group were the primary financial support of their families, that their tour was already losing money, and that Sunye simply wouldn’t or couldn’t be the cause of everyone else suffering just so she could take time to grieve.

New to the group and seventeen years old, Hyerim didn’t have a clue how she was supposed to help. She focused on not flubbing up her lines and tried to stay out of the way. This proved impossible when she and Sunye were paired as roommates at multiple hotels, and she was forced to face the silence of grief head-on.

For the most part, Sunye contained her grief within herself, putting on a brave face and watching pay-per-view comedies with Jo Kwon after the concert until she slipped into a restless sleep and Jo Kwon wished Hyerim goodnight and left them alone in the semi-dark. A few stops into the second leg of the tour, though, Sunye dragged her suitcase into their new room (which looked exactly like all the others) and stooped down to take off the lock. 

She fumbled with the numbers spiraled against the side of the lock, then yanked on it. Nothing happened. She stood up and kicked the suitcase so hard it fell back against the bed, and then thumped to the floor. She stared at it like she couldn’t comprehend what she’s seeing. 

“Unnie, let me do it,” Hyerim said in a small voice. From the beginning, she’d been afraid of Sunye—afraid of her exacting perfectionism. Now, though, she was afraid that Sunye might break if she was touched. 

Sunye sank to the floor, her knees curling to her chest. “I’m so tired,” she said. 

Awkward, Hyerim tried to figure out what to do. She could go get someone else, but it was late and it wasn’t like this was a crisis except that Hyerim was pretty sure Sunye would prefer anyone else besides her. Still, she was the one in the room. She crossed the room and knelt beside Sunye’s suitcase. “What’s the code?”

Sunye told her and Hyerim opened the lock on the first try. When she looked up, Sunye’s eyes were watering as she stared at the small metal contraption in Hyerim’s hand.

Hyerim placed the lock on the dresser and sat down next to Sunye. “What if you took a day off?” she asked, her voice small.

Sunye shook her head, but didn’t say anything. In total, there had been seven days between her father’s death and their Vancouver concert. A week to grieve. Then business as usual. The machine could not be turned off.

Sunye lay down on the flat hotel carpet. “I’m so tired,” she said, curling onto her side. Hyerim watched a tear slip over her nose, down her other cheek, and fall onto the carpet.

Hyerim reached out and put a hand on Sunye’s shoulder. Thankfully, Sunye moved to hold it, even in her exhaustion teaching her how to comfort someone properly.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Sunye whispered. Hyerim thought about the five of them on all the billboards in Seoul, how their voices had been the soundtrack of everyone’s existence, and now she was trying to hold Sunye together while she fell apart. The air conditioner rumbled to life as if to muffle the noise of Sunye crying. Sunye would never quit, Hyerim was sure. In that moment, it seemed a tragedy that she would never quit.

  
  
  


After her breakfast with Sunye, Hyerim doesn’t see Nichkhun until their next schedule brings them together to promote the upcoming JYP Nation schedule. She doesn’t see much of anyone, actually—Sunmi stays in her room, barely looking up from her phone when Hyerim knocks on her bedroom door to offer her tofu stew, but then she goes clubbing a few hours later and texts to say she’ll be at Sohee’s. Yeeun practically lives at Jinwoon’s now that her schedule allows, and Yubin is strangely elusive in her texts, promising to be home “soon.” And so Hyerim is left with her thoughts for a couple of days until she drives herself to the company building and steps into a makeshift studio, where she finds herself looking at the familiar shape of Nichkhun’s back.

He greets her warmly in English, with a neutral facial expression that would never cause anyone to suspect they’d been sleeping together for the better part of a year. Hyerim greets him in return, trying to settle the sick feeling in her stomach. She excuses herself just long enough to steal away into a bathroom on another floor. She hasn’t eaten anything in over a day and has been subsisting on water, but judging by her reflection in the bathroom mirror, no one will be able to tell. She looks thin but not _ thin, _ not _ beautiful_. Just passable. She returns to the studio. This time, Nichkhun doesn’t even look up when she enters the room.

She tries not to think about him. She tries to think about the task at hand: playing games and putting on a happy face for the camera. Jo Kwon is so good at it no one would ever realize he’d been in a sour mood seconds before the cameras started rolling. Yubin sits quietly, just in Hyerim’s peripheral vision, giving her a subtle thumbs up once when she glances over. Nichkhun faces forward the whole time, only glancing back at her when she introduces herself, his smile at once warm and enigmatic. She tries not to think about anything, but she finds herself thinking about the time she went down on him in his car in the company building parking garage, and afterward he’d said _ there’s no one like you, Lim_, and for about ten seconds she felt like maybe she didn’t completely hate herself. She hates herself now.

He touches her, briefly, in the middle of one of the games. Just his fingertips brushing over her arm, adjusting her to the right spot. She flushes but they’re out of view of the camera. When she dares to glance at him, he’s enthralled with the game, or at least pretending to be, and no one else is looking at her.

After the broadcast ends, Yubin comes over and circles her arms around Hyerim’s waist. “You’re so skinny,” she says, resting her head against Hyerim’s arm.

“You’re skinnier,” Hyerim says. She twists her head to look down at Yubin and traces the line of her eyes directly to where Momo and Nayeon stand across the room, talking to Younghyun and Jaebum with bright, young smiles on their faces. They are skinny, and they are youthful, and they have years of potential stretching out in front of them.

“I’m the oldest girl here,” Yubin says. “Wooyoung said it.”

“I’m still older than you.”

Hyerim jumps at the sound of Nichkhun’s voice behind them. Yubin swivels Hyerim's chair around to face him, her smile pressing against Hyerim’s arm.

“We’re getting close to our expiration date,” Yubin jokes.

“I prefer to think of us as a fine wine aging to perfection.” He winks at Hyerim. Her heart pounds against her chest.

“Must be nice to have a dick,” Yubin laughs. “Makes everything easier.”

Wisely, Nichkhun just flushes and shrugs. One of the staff calls Yubin’s name and she goes to find them, leaving Hyerim and Nichkhun staring at each other, the bright studio lights warm against their skin.

“So—” Hyerim begins, without a clue of what she’s going to say.

At that moment, Jae rushes up to them, draping an arm over Nichkhun’s shoulders. “Guys,” he says quickly in English, “are we going out tonight, or what?”

Hyerim rips her eyes away from Nichkhun and focuses on a spot over Jae’s shoulder. In the background she can see Momo and Nayeon laughing, throwing their hair back without a care in the world.

“Maybe not tonight,” Nichkhun says.

  
  
  


Predictably, she ends up at his house.

He pushes her up against the cold glass door to his patio and they have sex with her naked back exposed to the outside world. Somewhere beneath the overwhelming rhythm of physical ecstasy throbs a low baseline of another thought: if anyone in the surrounding houses saw her, they would say she was the low-budget replacement for another girlfriend, the pathetic slut in a drama with low ratings. This thought gets drowned out as he pushes her closer to climax and she leans her head back against the glass, giving in, letting go.

But these thoughts are like a virus lying dormant in her mind. They flare up again, after, as she lies on his expensive sheets. Moonlight falls across his statuesque body. He has one arm beside her, fingers gently threading through her hair. His eyes are half-closed. If she stays long enough he will want her again, but after that she will leave, like she always does.

“Why are we doing this?”

She doesn’t really mean to say it aloud, or maybe she does. His fingers stop their movement in her hair.

“What do you mean?” he asks, sleepy.

She swallows hard, afraid of what comes next. It’s hot in his house because his air conditioner broke and he hasn’t gotten someone out to fix it yet; anyway, he’ll leave for China tomorrow.

“We’ve been… doing this for months,” she says carefully. “I’m not—I’m not sleeping with anyone else, you know?”

He shifts next to her, moving to prop himself up on his elbow. Now she can’t avoid looking at him. Looking at him is a big mistake, though, because she wants him to love her so badly she almost takes it all back.

“We’re having fun,” he says, mouth crooking into a boyish smile.

“Like a one-night stand on repeat,” she says.

His smile falls. “I don’t do one-night stands,” he says definitively. “I’m not that guy.”

And he’s not that guy. She does know that much. She trusts him to be _ this _ guy, respectful and careful. He’s never once pushed her to do something she didn’t want to or demanded anything from her she wasn’t ready to give. Somehow, though, this seems beside the point.

“Then—”

“We’re friends.” He smiles with his lips pressed together and reaches out to brush her hair off her forehead, fingers hot against her skin. “After Tiffany, you know, I just—I just needed a friend.”

_ And that’s all you’ll ever be_, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to say it.

Somewhere in the back of her mind she hears a very small voice. It sounds a little like Sunye’s, but a lot more like her own. It whispers, _ you don’t have to stay_.

It takes all the strength she has left in her frail frame, but she manages to sit up.

“I don’t think we should do this anymore,” she says.

  
  
  
  
  


_ 난 혜림, a Wonder Girl, that’s me _

_ —Wonder Girls, “Back” _

  
  


“Truth or dare,” Yeeun said.

“Truth.”

Sohee flipped to the next page in her magazine without looking up at Yeeun. Yeeun, silhouetted in the golden Los Angeles sunset shining through the small window of their shared trailer, looked briefly at Hyerim with a gleam in her eyes.

“Did you fake sick this morning to get out of letting someone else do your makeup?”

“No,” Sohee said, slowly and deliberately. “I _ was _ sick just thinking about letting that lady do my makeup.”

Yeeun burst out laughing. From where Hyerim sat, the thick layer of bronzer contouring Yeeun’s cheekbone reflected back orange sunlight. As if everything else weren’t foreign enough, somehow the makeup norms seemed an unbridgeable gap between this world and the one they’d left, especially makeup on a Nickelodeon budget. Seoul felt very, very far away.

“Sunye,” Sohee said, kicking Sunye on the other side of the couch. “Truth or dare.”

“Truth.”

“You’re no fun,” Sohee said, crinkling her nose.

“You picked truth,” Yubin pointed out, typing away on her phone.

“But my face is harder to read,” Sohee said. “Fine.” She paused, as if deliberating on her question, her self-applied makeup even more obviously chic when contrasted with Sunye’s. “If you could get one ‘undo’ button in life, would you undo this whole U.S. debut?”

Silence fell over the five of them. It grew heavier the longer Sunye stayed quiet. Hyerim chewed at her lip, glancing at her own reflection in a hairspray-spotted mirror hanging on the wall. She liked the way she looked, to her surprise. She looked pretty, garish makeup and all. She hadn’t felt pretty since pre-debut, and it was odd to her that she felt pretty now, when everything was falling apart, as one empty promise after another dissipated before their eyes.

“Of course not,” Sunye said finally. Hyerim looked at her again, and found Sunye looking back at her. 

_ Of course not_, Hyerim repeated in her head. They had to take the good with the bad. They didn’t get an option to undo the past, only to move forward, one day at a time until they grasped success or failure and maybe—eventually—someone might finally tell them, _ you’ve done well. _

  
  
  


Hyerim arrives back at the apartment before midnight. To her surprise, the living room is alive with the noise of her group. She rounds the corner and finds them all sitting there—Yeeun with her guitar, Yubin reading a book, and Sunmi and Sohee on the floor, putting together a puzzle on the coffee table.

“Where have you been, young lady?” Yubin calls out.

“Getting laid?” Sohee asks, without looking up.

“Shush,” Sunmi giggles, throwing herself over to cover Sohee’s mouth with her hand. “You’ll burn her virgin ears!”

Hyerim gives a tight smile, thinking of how Nichkhun looked when she turned around on the path in front of his house. He looked like he couldn’t really understand why she was walking away.

“That’s not really my style,” she says, leveling her gaze at Sohee as Sunmi snickers. Sohee’s eyebrows lift in the slightest acknowledgment of surprise.

“Come here,” Yeeun says, scooting over to make room for Hyerim on the couch. “Look at this.”

Hyerim reads over the email Yeeun shows her, a deceptively casual discussion with the head of a small music company on what they could do for all four Wonder Girls if they chose to sign with them. It is a fairly thorough plan with hints of their promotional strategy and sustainability, but somehow it rings false. Hyerim has seen a lot of those in her short career and she wonders if Yeeun, the smartest among them, really doesn't see it—or doesn't want to.

“It’s just an idea,” Yubin says, non-committal. “We don’t know what JYPE is going to offer us.”

Hyerim catches Sunmi’s eye just briefly before Sunmi returns to the puzzle. Of course they all already know. They know better than most.

Hyerim tries to picture herself doing this work indefinitely, one uncertain year after one uncertain year. She pictures exhaustion grabbing her like a weight around her ankles, pulling her deeper and deeper into dark waters. She imagines dropping those last few kilos and then some, at which point her skeleton would look back at her, mocking her. She imagines the four of them stuck in stasis, trying to be beautiful gilded idols while they are ground into dust.

  
  
  


That night, Hyerim finds a webpage for Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. A sense of fate shivers over her. She clicks _How to Apply._

_end._

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to my friends Alex, Sapphy, and Reet for helping me make this fic happen over many agonizing weeks.
> 
> Comments are always appreciated <3


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